FUREY: Saudi Arabia’s manufactured outrage is about proving they can make us submit

Saudi Arabia wants Canada to jump. How high? As high as they can make us. Then they want us to bow down and kiss their ring.

There’s really no other way to take their disproportionate reaction to a couple of Tweets, how they’ve implemented an almost total moratorium on diplomatic and trade relations (oh, but they’ll keep selling us their far-from-ethical oil).

“There is nothing to mediate. A mistake has been made and a mistake should be corrected,” Adel al-Jubeir said at a news conference in Riyadh the other day. “Canada knows what it needs to do. We don’t accept interference in our affairs.”

And what, pray tell, is it that we know we need to do? Here’s what McGill political science professor Rex Brynen told CBC: “They want to make an example of us and therefore we would have to do an awful lot of grovelling and apologizing, I think, to get the Saudis to end it.”

This is all in response to tweets, one by Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and the other by her department, voicing disapproval at the Saudi imprisonment of Samar Badawi, a human rights activist and sister of the also imprisoned Raif Badawi, whose wife and children live in Canada.

The idea that there’s nothing to mediate is nonsense. Are we to believe that the Saudis are so lacking in personal fortitude, so weak and worried about what PM Socks thinks about them, that it is only natural for them to be in a near irreparable frenzy over a couple of social media posts that didn’t even travel all that far?

To the contrary, this is exactly the sort of thing that one typically does mediate. The diplomats pick up the phone and talk over what is in truth a very minor issue. It’s not like this is the first time the Saudis have been publicly called out for their human rights failings.

Back in January 2015 then Conservative foreign affairs minister John Baird tweeted something similar: “Canada is deeply concerned by flogging of Raif Badawi – it is a violation of human dignity and freedom of expression.”

Now the distinction here is that Baird simply voiced concern, he did not call for an “immediate release” of the prisoner, as the departmental one did from the other week.

Okay. So maybe don’t do it that way next time around.

But on a scale of 1-10, Freeland’s misstep is about 1 or 2. Meanwhile, the Saudis are trying to tell us it’s an off the charts 11.

It’s obvious what’s going on here. They are trying to redraw the boundaries. They want to reset the barometer of offence to absurdly low levels, such that everyone will now walk on eggshells around their delicate sensibilities.

This is a manufactured crisis. It’s like back in 1989 when they went into a frenzy over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. (Iran gets the credit for leading the charge, but Saudi Arabia was also front and centre.)

None of the people protesting had actually read the book. It was not genuinely, viscerally, offensive to them. Rather, they targeted it. They made a choice to go nuts over it. Why? To prove a point. To get Rushdie and his publishers and the whole West to submit.

The campaign against Canada is a deliberate and organized one. The Sun has learned that Saudi medical residents in Canada have received calls telling them that they have 30 days to leave the country. They’re also told they’ll be taken care of upon their return. This whole affair is something of a test case for them.

There are those out there pointing out that Trudeau has an inconsistent record on these issues, like how he shamefully failed to support the Iranian protesters. Or how his virtue-signalling has costs us key relationships, such as how needless feminism provisions scuppered trade deals. These are all good points, but at this particular moment they’re sidebar issues.

Let’s not let valid criticisms of Trudeau push us in the direction of the Saudis. Because that’s exactly where they want us.